The Journal of the Civil War Era

On the eve of the Mexican-American War, the regular U.S. Army numbered just 3,554 officers and men.¹ Yet by 1845 the army had emerged as an important institution in American life. After the war, though its size remained diminutive, the army’s importance to national development increased with the westward march of American settlement. How could a profession of arms—undersized and regarded with considerable skepticism by segments of the citizenry since the creation of the republic—facilitate such rapid expansion of the American economy and state? [End Page 250]

William D. Adler argues in Engineering Expansion that through the U.S. Army’s use of force—and, just as important, through extensive nonvio-lent means—it was instrumental in shaping the destiny of the nineteenth-century United States. The army did this in numerous ways: by coercion, by consolidating newly acquired territory under federal control, by encouraging westward settlement, by protecting American citizens on the frontier along important routes of supply, by bringing its technical expertise to bear in developing and constructing infrastructure, by promoting science and technology, and by facilitating the flow of goods and services. In all of this, the army expanded an economy that otherwise lacked the guiding hand of a strong, centralized, and bureaucratized state.

Adler’s methods reflect his academic training in political science. Throughout, he deploys robust quantitative and theoretical analysis in depicting how the army charted the nation’s economic expansion at the center, the nation’s capital and developed population centers in the East, and at the periphery, “the frontier regions of the nation” (3). His findings are multifaceted. Through force and coercion, the U.S. Army “shaped the pattern and direction of the country’s economic future,” without which the United States may well “have developed in a very different way” (55). Though the army contributed valuable engineering expertise (which officers acquired at the United States Military Academy) to the construction of roads and canals at the center, Adler finds that the army’s role in developing infrastructure was more pronounced in frontier regions. Just as intuitively, Adler finds that congressional authorities exercised stronger control over the U.S. Army in the center, whereas at the periphery officers could execute their orders to the letter or interpret them with flexibility absent direct oversight. In this respect, Adler suggests, “civilian control over the military was, at best, highly attenuated” (108). In the book’s ultimate (and strongest) chapter, Adler demonstrates how the organization of the War Department and its personnel—in particular, bureau chiefs under the secretary of war who resourced army operations at the periphery— enabled the army to influence policy makers. Bureaus such as the Corps of Topographical Engineers (the inspiration for Adler’s title) helped the War Department to achieve a degree of bureaucratic autonomy theretofore never experienced in the United States and enjoyed considerable success shaping the economic future of the nation.

Engineering Expansion is a monograph in the classic sense of the term: compact, highly theoretical, and arranged as a compilation of analytical sections that read almost as articles. Its chapters, “Coercion and Economic Development,” “Building the Nation, Building the Economy,” “Who Commands?” and “Political Entrepreneurs and Institutional Capacity,” [End Page 251] build well on one another and teem with charts and tables. These depict major conflicts with Native American tribes, the expansion and contraction of the U.S. Army, road construction in the antebellum period, the various professions of United States Military Academy graduates in the first thirty-eight years of the institution’s history, fluctuations in the number of troops garrisoned at various forts across the United States from 1834 to 1840, a roster of the tenures and major socioeconomic activities of all secretaries of war from 1789 to 1860, and Senate votes to defund and reorganize the army (among other data points). Curiously, the book contains no engravings or images, a problem...